Arena Profile: Meredith McGehee

Meredith McGehee is the Policy Director at the Campaign Legal Center where she directs the legislative and media policy efforts. She is also the principal of McGehee Strategies, which specializes in public interest advocacy campaigns. McGehee is the former President of the Alliance for Better Campaigns, a public interest group that sought to put meaning back into broadcasters' statutory obligation to serve the public interest.

Formerly Senior Vice President and Chief Lobbyist for Common Cause, McGehee has been recognized as one of the top nonprofit/grassroots lobbyists in Washington. She has given talks at universities and organizations around the country, has testified before Congress, has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Village Voice, Salon, Broadcasting & Cable, The Washington Times, Des Moines Register and numerous other newspapers, and has appeared on CNN, NBC, ABC and a variety of national and local television and radio news shows. Prior to joining Common Cause, McGehee was Legislative Director for U.S. Representative Lane Evans of Illinois and a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Dante Fascell of Florida. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, West Africa and is a Phil Beta Kappa, cum laude graduate of Pomona College in California.

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Meredith McGehee's Recent Discussions

Would campaign finance transparency result in donor bullying?

When it comes to changing his tune on disclosure, the rank hypocrisy of Senator Mitch McConnell is not that surprising. The audacity of it is breathtaking, but the swing was predictable. After all, Senator McConnell is first and foremost a politician who, as Senate Minority Leader, is doing everything he can for his party to gain control of the government. If anonymous funding appears at this point to benefit his party, disclosure is bad. If the shoe were on the other foot - if the Democrats seemed to be gaining advantage at the moment from opaque spending - you can be assured he would be harping against secret money.

While there is no doubt that recent Court decisions and a moribund FEC are working hard to destroy the current campaign finance regulatory system, the one area where the Senator McConnell and his allies have lost consistently in the courts is on disclosure. Their efforts to analogize a possible threat of harassment of current donors to the threats of harm faced by members of the NAACP in the Deep South in the 1950s are honestly a bit sad - and revealing.

There’s no doubt that our political discourse has become less civil and angrier. But there is no record showing that real, widespread, repeated or serious harm has occurred. To sacrifice meaningful disclosure about who is spending money to influence the outcome of our elections - and thus who controls government power - to a theoretical concern about “chilled” or “muzzled” speech is just a fig leaf for a political agenda.

On the surface, a Constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United might seem like a golden ticket for those who were stunned by the Court's decision. An amendment would appear to respond to the problem of huge corporate expenditures and contributions often made with anonymous funds, and would place such restrictions beyond the reach of the heavy-handed Roberts Court. But while an effort the likes of Rep. Schiff’s is admirable, it is not necessarily the best answer.

It is certainly understandable why many favor a Constitutional amendment to counter Citizens United, which overturned nearly 100 years of laws. But Constitutional amendments are nearly impossible to pass - according to C-SPAN, up to 200 amendments are proposed every term of Congress - and even once that mountain is scaled, are often possible to circumvent.

Rep. Schiff’s proposed amendment would allow for “content-neutral limitations on private campaign contributions or independent political campaign expenditures,” yet the regulation of “expenditures” as used in campaign finance law is, by definition, content-based in some respects (i.e., ads that contain express advocacy or references to candidates, etc.). And many shadow super PACs (c4s and c6s) are claiming - to date successfully - that they are not making “expenditures” as defined by statute and therefore might not be captured by an amendment.

Advocates for fixing our current money-run-amok system are understandably frustrated. But now is the time to focus energies on improving disclosure, shifting the incentives for small-donor fundraising, getting resources to candidates so they don't have to sell their soul to large donors, and energizing public opinion. Citizens United will eventually be overturned, and a constitutional amendment might eventually pass, but there is much to do now.

Has the coverage of super PACs, and Adelson's donation specifically, been warranted? Absolutely! Citizens United and its progeny, SpeechNow, have created an Orwellian world in which money is speech and corporations are people. it defies common sense.

New avenues created by Citizens United allow billionaires like Adelson to spend unlimited money to influence candidates -and the elections themselves. This avenue for big money-influence is nothing less than a seismic shift in the democratic process.

Before 2010, gifts to PACs (groups that influence federal elections) had limits. If Sheldon Adelson wanted to give to organized political entities, there were caps in place to limit his personal influence. Individuals could make independent expenditures, but they had proved both cumbersome and had limited effectiveness for a number of reasons.

Since Citizens United, millionaires are giving big checks to super PACs like Restore Our Future or Priorities USA, which no one seriously disputes are organized surrogates for Mitt Romney and President Obama, respectively. Adelson’s private meeting with candidate Romney just before his donation makes this connection all the more clear. One individual has announced the intention to spend $100 million to determine who wields power in our nation.

The media has an obligation and a duty to cover any one and anything that seeks through large amounts of money to determine the future of our elections.

The jury considering the charges against former Senator John Edwards has already surprised many observers by taking more time to consider the case than it took the Edwards lawyers to put on their defense. There is speculation that the case will be appealed if Edwards is convicted, raising questions about the judge’s instructions to the jury about the evidence and applicable standards of law.

One of the most interesting aspects of the case has been the disagreements about whether the case should have been brought in the first place - disagreements that are not falling along party or ideological lines. Those speaking out against the prosecution include Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and former Federal Election Commissioner Scott Thomas, who testified in the case (with the jury out of the room).

On a recent Diane Rehm show on NPR, I agreed with one of my frequent antagonists, Republican lawyer Jan Baran. Jan believes that the Edwards prosecution should have been pursued. Washington Post opinion writer Ruth Marcus questioned whether it was a wise use of prosecutorial discretion.

The case has presented the Department of Justice's Office of Public Integrity with a lose-lose scenario from the outset. If they did not prosecute Edwards, the public message would be clear: the law condones a candidate for our nation's highest office taking millions of dollars from wealthy benefactors to buy off his mistress and keep his political ambitions alive, despite the existence of emails and conversations that showed he was well aware of the arrangements that were made.

If the prosecutors did pursue the case and lost, the message would be the same. The conclusion would be that the law does not prohibit individuals running for public office to find rich sugar daddies to underwrite efforts to hide the candidate’s dirty laundry from public view as long as the purpose remains unspoken or unacknowledged by the candidate.

Based on press reports, it is difficult to assess whether the prosecutors presented sufficient evidence to meet the high standards required - appropriately - for a criminal prosecution. And it will be fascinating to see how the jury interprets the “for the purpose of influencing an election” standard that is in the statute. The bulk of the case appears to rely on the credibility of former Edwards aide Andrew Young.

But it was correct for this prosecution to be undertaken. As Jan Baran has said about the consequences of a loss, “Why wouldn’t a wealthy individual be able to pay for the tuition of a candidate’s kids going to college? Or a mortgage? Maybe they’ll get them a second vacation home. There are some very fundamental issues at stake here.”

In the end, it is likely that Edwards will just be seen as another of the corrupt politicians in Washington. The more valuable impact of this prosecution should be to demand - and expect - better from our leaders. And to hold our politicians accountable for their actions when they seek or obtain power.

Recently, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) proposed eliminating limits on contributions to political candidates as the solution to the current campaign finance mess. He says unlimited contributions to candidates won't further empower the wealthy; they will just create more political speech. And he said this with a straight face!

Sen. Alexander said that if Congress eliminated the limits on contributions to candidates, there would be no need to worry about large contributions to outside groups taking over our elections and as they would become minor players in our elections.

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